When my Grandma Cahill moved into a nursing home a few years ago, her house on the South Side of Binghamton, New York had to be cleaned out and sold. Some of her belongings were split among my father and his brothers, some were split among the grandchildren, a few things were sold, a few were donated, and the rest went in the trash.

In addition to a set of china—which sits in my father’s basement since I have nowhere to put it in my tiny Brooklyn apartment—I was entrusted with my grandma’s box of recipes. It’s made of thin brown plastic with a wood grain pattern and is bursting with dozens of index cards and scraps of paper. Most were written down in my grandmother’s cursive, while others were written by her friends on personalized stationary (some in poetic verse). I imagine her friends coming over for cocktail hour and handing her a recipe for brownies in a sealed envelope, like government secrets or a cash payoff.

The box is also full of old newspaper clippings and recipes that came with packaged foods, like fruited Jello salads and Betty Crocker frostings. One little booklet of healthy recipes includes a helpful chart that shows your ideal weight based on your height in two-inch heels. Oh, the sixties.

My Aunt Ann and mother are the keepers of my Grandma Mangan’s recipes. Like Grandma Cahill, my Grandma Mangan also had a box full of recipes on index cards. She also kept a number of recipes and clippings stuffed between the pages of a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. They don’t include any poetry as far as I’ve found, but they do include a lot of cooking tips from Dom DeLuise.

I have so many of my grandmothers’ recipes, but I have few memories of them cooking. I remember the meals—Grandma Mangan made big dinners for our family every Sunday and Grandma Cahill was in charge of the Christmas Eve feast—but I was too young to help, or too busy running with a pack of cousins in the backyard to notice what was going on inside. Now that Grandma Mangan is gone and Grandma Cahill’s mind has faded, these recipes and the memories of their children and grandchildren are all that’s left of decades in the kitchen.

I missed the chance to learn from my grandmothers in person, but by making their recipes and those they collected, I hope to learn their techniques and connect with my families’ culinary pasts. I’m also going to dig into my old cookbook collection and learn about the cooking styles of specific communities and regions across the country. Kitchen Archive is where I’ll share everything I find with you.

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